Images of women

WHAT it takes to be woman?

A woman of substance. A woman equal to another human. A woman equal to man. A woman of value regardless of gender, race, education, religion and age.

Is it a place that we can be just woman. After reading many works of women in activism, feminism, women in theater who lavishly pre-occupied themselves in dismantling, dissecting, questioning, reacting, interpreting, explaining, revolting and recreating stories of women. I noticed three things: women as subjects of pre-conceived social constructs; oppression of women in the roles that they play in a man’s world, family, work and society and women’s recognition and respect through intellectual emancipation that gave birth to words, letters, prose of women playwrights, directors, novelist and poets and the like. It seems a whole birthing process of being imprisoned has a huge price for freedom and equality.

The empowerment of women comes in many forms. For modern women, gender and reproductive rights was a controversial headline recently under the Republic Act No. 10354 or RH Bill 2012 which has two sides of the coin in advancing women’s agenda.

For the indigenous women like the Bai Narda Saway and her sisters, women assert themselves as healers and ritualists who protect the sacredness of places and all living spirits that cohabit the ancestral abode.

For home grown entrepreneur, Pura Maestrado from Mambajao, Camiguin, it is the alchemy of turning cacao seeds into chocolate that serve the palette of islanders visitors from all over the world.

For the Lumin Faan, T’boli crafts woman, it’s the art of turning scrap plastic into precious beads that shines like glass.

For Salima Saway, Talaandig soil painter, its breathing life to a blank canvass using soil pigments.

In the Mambajao market a young woman frolicked in the morning sun marking her territory in the negotiations of economic exchanges while proving food and nutrition on the table.

For a Mantigue Island fisherwoman, the value of hardwork and the affluence of eating a fresh catch transcends a mundane task of food gathering into a respectable preoccupation of feeding the family and the community.

World-renowned Filipina woman, Sister Mary John Mananzan, OSB became a world figure in Asian Journal: recognized as one of the top 100 most inspiring people in the world.

From an online source, in her groundbreaking career, Mananzan has worked to empower women and to combat injustice and oppression wherever she finds it—whether within the political system, or at the hands of the church. She has led the way in integrating feminist activism into the Catholic faith and pioneered in the field of women’s studies by founding the program at St. Scholastica’s College in Manila.

The images of these women are a wealth of resources for me that mirror women archetypes of the powerful, traditional, indigenous, eternal, mystical, modern, engendered, no gender, misfits, single, mother, grandmother and wild women. A generation of women that come and go in our midst through stories.

Reading my favorite woman book author, I came across the word again “wild” with a new meaning. Clarissa Pinkola Estes awakened the wild woman archetype in her book “Women Who Run With the Wolves” where she premeditated “stories as medicine,” for story is most often dictated by inner sensibilities and outer need. Some traditions set aside specific times for telling stories. Among the Pueblo tribes, Coyote stories are reserve for winter telling. Certain tales of Eastern Europe are only told in autumn after harvest. In Archetypal and healing work, we weigh when to tell stories. We carefully consider the time, place, the person, and the medicine needed.

Meeting these powerful women impregnated me with mixed emotions that opened and healed some old wounds of a woman child.

I celebrated the process of redefining my own self-identity while watching other women and reading other women’s stories in their poems, novels, plays, memories, rants, monologues, prayers and narratives.

Eve Ensler made other women speak about their pains for “speaking about violence against women because the story of women is the story of life itself. In speaking about it, you cannot avoid speaking about racism and domination, poverty, patriarchy, empire building, war, sexuality, desire, imagination. The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women, and keeps them in their so-called place.” I resonate with all these other women writers who speak for me and for other women who never learned to write as well as Sor Juana de la Cruz.

I would like to take it from the words of the elders of the tribe, “that what matters is not to represent others, instead to learn to represent ourselves” (Spivak cited by Miclat) I am learning to speak like a woman child, learning new words in her mouth, and may take some time to digest and to sound academic, but I will try to munch the theories carefully not to give me indigestion. I am a willing companion in the journey of reinventing my own self as I free myself from my own prejudices and taking a more progressive lens in the way I see things from a woman’s perspective.

I may have to disagree with many Western concepts of self-indulge individual emancipation and questioning issues for in some other cultures like in my community, the women may have to play certain roles that only women can do.

The roles may require multi-tasking roles for women in the community that may seem derogatory for western perspective, but in our cultural lens, these have nothing to do with equal rights, but by being a productive responsible person which we call “mother” in the broadest sense of the community.

In a matriarchal cultural context of our society, we expect more from women but we also give honor to the role they play. In the economic context, the role reversals and gender sensitivity are now widely practice.

Women are the storytellers, the weavers of cultures and the keepers of the knowledge of communities. They give birth to the next storytellers and culture-bearers. Given a venue to express their ideas, women love to interact and share their stories.

We start with our own personal stories. We need to make women discover their power as storytellers to be able to create powerful stories that can create positive change and influence on their own communities.

Mindscapes of women are full of emotions. The readings have not only opened a kaleidoscope of images in my stomach, it has opened a well of new vocabulary as I reinvent the woman who has the power over her own script as a real actor of life.

Art empowers people to transform memories into works with cultural and private significance. They believe that the development of a sense of worth and importance through storytelling in oral tradition, in print, film or through theater will assist women to participate in dialogues and actions, which may eventually lead to the deconstructions of oppressive system.

As one of my Grassroots Women Film Project, I collaborate with other filmmakers that added more ideas to the context of how to address women’s trauma. “Many women feel that they do not have their own voice that they are at the mercy of invisible power that has control over them. In order to subvert their self-concept as helpless and vulnerable, it is first necessary to help heal trauma.

Through sharing experiences, making expressive art and the airing of fears and anxieties, women learn that each of us is original and that each can be influential if she wants to be. Revitalizing suppressed female energy through art will advance women’s human rights, because art provides an alternative means of living one that dignifies human experience and expands women’s sphere beyond the domestic arena.

Women build community through meeting in groups, bonding through sharing, airing formerly private suffering, which often leads to acknowledgment of group suffering and thus, in many cases, group advocacy.

End violence vs women

This small initiative is somehow parallel to Eve Ensler’s movement to end violence against women. Sharing one’s story can be healing, making it theater as rehearsal for life that makes it even more powerful and universal.

However, after all the struggle in some countries, it was only recently that women have been given the rights to vote and express their free will in public. In the stories that I am reading in Newsweek about an Egyptian activist, scholar, medical doctor and book writer Nawal El Saadawi retold her ordeal of being imprisoned for her writings.

In the recent uprising, Saadawi was in Cairo’s Tahrir Square every single day and served as an icon to younger men who respected her book where she wrote about women sexuality. In her own words she said “women are sex objects in the free markets. I am against make-up. Plastic surgery is postmodern veil… I divorced three men. “Why? Ha ha! For my freedom.

So I could write” She continued to write on a toilet paper with the eye pencil from a prostitute when she was in prison. She called her case Crime of Opinion and having a pen is like a having a gun.

In her memoir, she wrote, “the pen is the most valuable thing in my life. My words on paper are more valuable to me than my life itself. More valuable than my children, more than my husband, more than my freedom” I admire the courage of women that cannot be compared to the masculinity of a man. For an Egyptian like Saadawi, it is more than just being brave to even speak what you think, it is playing with death.

In the context of human excellence, I realized woman is an incredible juxtaposition of multiple intelligence which prepared her for multi-tasking, child rearing, as giver, nurturer, mother and teacher, all-in-one.

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